Comment by randycupertino

2 days ago

The irony is the company is trying to make robots to help clean airbnbs for renter turnovers. Instead they are messing up airbnbs and making them harder to clean before turnovers.

13 comments

randycupertino

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est31  2 days ago

It's fine to make mistakes, that's how you learn. The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.

So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.

It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.

The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.

  • mrandish  2 days ago

    > The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.

    I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.

    • RobotToaster  1 day ago

      This was my thought. I can understand not wanting to go to the hassle of trying to explain that you're testing an experimental prototype robot to a confused Airbnb owner.

      What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.

      Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...

      7 replies →

  • kjs3  1 day ago

    The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.

    I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.